What Happens To You When You Go On The Internet
By Thoughtis
I go on the Internet and for a brief moment, I have been fulfilled. Narcissus has been fed! I have “likes,” comments, and @tweets galore! I tend to them as if they’re a pet. I feed them, I give them water, I make sure everything in the digital world is taken care of. I respond to certain things and deliberately ignore others. Everything is deliberate on the Internet. No one “misses” anything. I see you seeing me, girl. I always do.
I go on the Internet when I’m stoned and/ or drunk. I’ve decided that it takes the edge off. When I’m stoned, I usually will go to Gorilla Versus Bear and listen to some new chillgaze jams. I’ll then get lost in a pocket of the virtual world. It could be Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, whatever. The last time this happened I read through all of my old tweets before falling asleep on my computer screen. When I’m drunk, it’s a little bit different. I’ll usually go on a rampage and tweet a million things and write on everyone’s Facebook wall. If my feelings are particularly raw, I’ll probably send a message to someone I shouldn’t. Honestly, using Facebook and Twitter when you’re drunk is a terrifying gamble. People need to be arrested for a T.U.I. (Tweeting Under The Influence) and a F.U.I. (Facebooking Under The Influence) and get their computer taken away as punishment.
I go on the Internet and feel consistently let down. I go in thinking what exactly? That there’ll be a Gael Garcia Bernal look-alike waiting for me to be his boyfriend in my inbox? That a million dollars will be rewarded to me after I like my thousandth comment? There’s a huge disparity between our expectations for the Internet and what it’s actually able to give us. We’ve known this from day one. Whenever we take a break from the Internet, we expect there to be hours of things we need to catch up on. In reality, we’ve made our rounds in ten minutes. It’s always a disappointment. We always seem to forget that, at the end of the day, there’s not much to actually do on the Internet.
I go on the Internet to, amongst other things, feel a part of the conversation. Not being on it is like not getting invited to the best slumber party at school. We’ll be bombarded with anecdotes and “Remember When”s and feel completely alienated from our peers. All of these social media sites have become necessary evils for our generation to function. You can delete everything and sign off but then you would be like that dude from Into The Wild or something. Don’t get it twisted. The Internet is addictive and we all need to go to Promises for detox.